In this article I would like to show you what kind of methods I've used to create my picture 'Autobot'. I always liked transformers, and the movie gave me a huge inspiration to build one. The car form of it is one of my recent car models, a 1975 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. I used 3D Studio Max 9 and Vray for modeling and rendering, the postworks were done with Photoshop.

Modeling

Because I wanted it to be able to move and transform, I had to create bones for it too. Actually, I started with the bones - I made a biped first and transformed it's parts to have a robot shape skeleton.

The modeling process looked like this: I modeled the robot's bodyparts after each other from the head to to feet, and when one part was finished, I looked for a section of the car's body that would look good there, cut it out and placed it on the robot like an armor, and linked them to the biped bodypart.

I always had to pay attention not to choose a section that is too far from robot part on the car in order to be able to create the transforming animation in the future. Not every armor parts are from the car body, but I tried to use as much as I can - you can see them darker on the pictures. For the whole robot (and the car too) I used poly-modeling and turbosmooth.

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Modeling Wire 1

Modeling Wire 2

Materials

The car paint is a 4 layer VrayBlend material. The base layer has a low glossiness reflection and the red colour of the car with a fresnel type falloff texture, the second layer has black diffuse and a 1.0 glossiness fresnel white reflection. The third layer is the little dirt and dust on the paint, which means it is a simple black diffuse material with a dirt mask bitmap. The fourth layer is the damaged paint, so it has lightgrey diffuse and a low glossiness reflection, and a bitmap mask. This mask was used also at the VrayDisplacement map, to bevel the damaged part a bit. There aren't unique maps for every red painted part on the bot, I made 6-7 different versions and some have been used multiple times.

(ID: 264645, pid: 0) Abhyodaya on Sun, 30 March 2014 9:07am Hey I always wanted to make this transformers but I don't know how we will make the robot with car parts and I cannot understand from the writing here it would have been more perfect if there would have been a video tutorial
I need this and its very important for me and I cannot buy anything I can only download the videos so can you give me the tutorial video so that I can download

(ID: 120278, pid: 0) Debojyoti Ghosh on Sat, 26 May 2012 4:48pm Will you please make a more detailed tutorial on the same topic?
DigitalTutors have recently launched their own. http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/learning_path.php?lpid=26
But it is directed towards the more advanced users.
May be you could create something more detailed using only Maya-Photoshop-AfterEffects; something targeted towards those who are relatively new to the world of CG.

(ID: 74831, pid: 0) Dhruva on Sat, 31 December 2011 12:17pm I want to buy your tutorial and I e-mail you please check it out.